I remember opening the front page of the newspaper around this time freshman Fall and seeing article after article about the recession. Banks were failing, families were losing their homes and companies were firing workers by the thousands. Meanwhile, I was sipping a $4 Odwalla at the Hop.
Three years later, not much has changed. Sure, the immediate threat of a double-dip recession seems to be on the wane, but Dartmouth student life feels no less isolated from the volatile world of lay-offs and mortgage defaults than it did in 2008. I still get a bunch of free shoes and equipment for playing on the lacrosse team and we still sit in $500 chairs during class.
These circumstances lead us to believe that we're living in a bubble. Cue the arguments and brainstorming about how we can "burst the bubble" by doing community service, studying abroad or putting on a bake sale for people in need. I'm all for these things I think they're great. But here's the issue: The bubble is a myth.
Dartmouth does not and has never existed in a bubble. The bubble is a construct we came up with to make sense of why our lives are so comfortable amidst a world full of war and poverty and injustice. It's understandable, too. Studying the world's problems from a velvet armchair in the Tower Room might give you a better grasp on "what's going on," but it also makes perceptible a gap between ourselves and the rest of, well, humanity.
Whether we believe it or not, Dartmouth is very much a part of the world and its problems. Take, for instance, our finance pipeline. Dartmouth places our graduates in top firms and, in turn, the finance world facilitates the management of our endowment. You can't deny that Dartmouth has a symbiotic relationship with the very locus of our current national crisis: Wall Street.
Such intimacy between higher education and big business is beyond problematic but that's beside the point here. I've come to accept, reluctantly, that not everyone agrees with me, and that my viewpoint is subjective and, as such, one of many. But when I hear fellow students say that Occupy Dartmouth has no right to be here because our alums and friends on Wall Street give Dartmouth a lot of money, I have to seriously question what the hell they're pouring in the punch at tails. Since when did young people become so obedient?
When we buy into the bubble mentality, it's impossible to see ourselves as part of something greater than just the privileged group of people who attend elite colleges. Living in an imaginary bubble is nice, but it breeds complacency whatever keeps things copacetic.
Over the past few years, Dartmouth employees have been subject to dramatic wage and healthcare cuts, in addition to the slew of sudden lay-offs. Many Dartmouth students have to worry about paying for books, tuition and food, not to mention the finances of their families back home. Oftentimes those difficulties go unnoticed. It's hard to see these things and empathize with the people around us when we live under the collective illusion that Dartmouth is not part of the "real" world.
Strangely, while Dartmouth's vast resources enrich our potential for leadership positions and career success, they can also impoverish our ability to connect. We're very fond of the John Sloan Dickey quote about making the world's problems our own. It's inspiring, but it perpetuates the notion that the world that needs saving is somewhere "out there."
Before we set our sights on those far-away places, before we try to figure out how to "burst the bubble," we should practice connecting with the people around us.
